For BloomReach Inc., the 64 percent decrease in venture investments that the online marketing segment witnessed between 2014 and 2015 is little more than just another industry statistic. The sales optimization provider this morning announced the completion of a hefty $56 million funding round that will help maintain its growth amid the slowdown that the competition is experiencing.

BloomReach has racked up major customers such as Nordstrom Inc., Staples Inc. and Neiman Marcus Group Inc. over the past few years thanks to a one-stop shop approach to personalizing online shopping experiences. Its toolkit consists of a profiler that analyzes the buying preferences of every visitor to an e-commerce site and uses the resulting insight to customize the functionality of the other component in the bundle, an embeddable product search engine. Items are organized based on their estimated appeal and filtered for duplicates without requiring any manual input.

Merchandising specialists do, however, have the option to bring a human touch into the equation using BloomReach’s complementary Compass software. Its graphical interface displays high-level metrics about customer spending patterns that can help identify opportunities for improvement in the automated results returned by the search suite. If, for instance, people who purchase wearables on an electronics retailer’s site often view wristbands before checking out, then a few could be manually included among the results for the keyword “Apple Watch”. Brands can also go a step further and rank suggested accessories based on factors like popular colors.

BloomReach claims that one top retailer was able to realize an average return of $8,000 per every tweak made in Compass, on top of the 10-40 percent baseline sales improvement from its search optimization suite. The figures make it easy to see why the startup’s backers are so confident about its prospects going into 2016. The investor roster includes private equity majors such as Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures as well as the venture capital arm of Salesforce.com and an unnamed sovereign wealth fund.

Image via Geralt